


Charlie Isn't Dead (And Other Little Known Facts)

by thebetterbradbury (sajere1)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Fix-It, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, Multi, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-10
Updated: 2020-12-11
Packaged: 2021-03-10 03:13:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,838
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27997323
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sajere1/pseuds/thebetterbradbury
Summary: Carver Edlund's books were still unfinished when it came time to conclude their TV spin-off. The ending has many fans crying 'heresy.' Real Game of Thrones situation, right? Surely, Edlund's actual books will end better.I have bad news. It is not just the ending that is different. Edlund lied in his stories. The books - the show - their premises are fundamentally flawed. There is a truth that Edlund based his work on. It's a truth that only the people that were involved would know.I have some very good news about who is writing this particular story.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester, Jessica Moore/Sam Winchester
Comments: 3
Kudos: 13





	1. Foreward: What's Up, Bitches?

It is a well-known fact that “Supernatural,” the television show, is based on a series of books by Carver Edlund, later revealed to be Chuck Shurley.

It is a somewhat lesser-known fact that _Supernatural,_ the book series by Chuck Shurley, is also based on something. And it is a really goddamn well-hidden fact that the thing that _Supernatural_ the book series is based on is, in fact, real life. Mostly on purpose. You’ve seen modern fantasy, you know the shtick about keeping the supernatural secret from the poor mortals, we don’t need to go over it again.

Normally this sort of status quo would be fine! The more media about the supernatural exists that people don’t believe, the more basis they have to help themselves in case they actually do come across it without compromising the lives of hunters. The thing is that it is now causing us a bit of what we, as professionals in the industry, like to call “a problem.” An issue, even, if you will. A predicament. One that requires the record to be set straight.

So: here’s the record. The things that go bump in the night are real. The details are a little different than you’ve been led to believe.

That record is important. Those details are important. We think there’s a lot of reasons that things got so screwed up in translation, and a lot of it wasn’t actively malicious! Sometimes Chuck’s visions didn’t give him the full story. Sometimes his publishers would have him change something for wider audience appeal, and then would have to keep changing things about the story to keep with what they’d already established or jump through hoops to make it work (we bring back WAY fewer people from the dead). Some of it was the showrunners trying to work past what notes Chuck left them (which, hey, great news for everybody who hated the ending!).

But some of it, we know for certain. Chuck was hiding things. He hid them for a reason. And without knowing which pieces are important to expose, we’re just gonna have to put ‘em all out there, from the beginning.

For the people who think I’m spewing crap: think of this as a reboot. Some characters you’ll recognize. Some you won’t. Some will share names and personalities but not stories with characters you know; some will share stories but not names and personalities. Some might not show up. You don’t have to believe our version. I’ve fact checked it with as many of the people involved as I can, but honestly, just because human memory is shit, we might be wrong about some things, too.

But the important stuff is here. And will be, when I can find the time to write them out between hunts – the great news about this thing we’re up against right now is that once we start this project, we’re not in danger until we finish this project (unless I die, and then someone else’ll have to pick it up, so if you start hearing from Sam, pour one out for me). Maybe I could've left this in the author's notes? And, like, in the future, for sure that's gonna be the main method. I was murdered in the show Supernatural, AMA in the comments. But for the "actually it's real" stuff, I just figured that it would be easier to get all of this out of the way at once, because there’s really no explaining shit like this fully in the end notes, and like. I was on fanfiction.net during the dark times. I know what having author’s notes mid-story is like. I may not technically be writing fanfiction but I still have _standards._

Call me Charlie. The truth is out there, my dudes. And I am going to hand it to you.


	2. The Curious Case of Mary Winchester

When Mary Winchester piled her weapons in the back of her truck and left town, the scandal of it was not that she disappeared – the ladies at work had been whispering about it for months, ever since the arguments had gone from common to explosive a few weeks before. No, the surprising thing was that she left her kids behind. Even her husband John went from a sort of distant resignation to total shock when he walked in the front door and Dean was still sitting at the dining room table, sipping his juice – the five-month-old Sam upstairs, sound asleep in his crib.

Mary left behind a lot. This was intentional – short of the clothes on her back, anything in that house could only weigh her down. But two things she left behind – both messages – were of particular importance to this story.

The first, she left ahead of time. When John came home that evening to find his house one person emptier and harried by reminders, on his bedside table was a note – a page ripped from one of those little notebooks you write grocery lists on. He opened it with trembling hands, and then he shoved it into his journal and grabbed a beer.

The second, she left earlier that day.

Mary Winchester looked something like a dangerous pirate who had been displaced a few hundred years and shoved into a flannel shirt. A homemaker she may have become for the sake of her boys, but a housewife she was not; her hands were just as calloused as her husband’s, her muscles just as thick, and her mouth just as foul. She had the grim wrinkles of a woman who had not been allowed to laugh in her life, and even around her sons, she didn’t crumble – just softened.

Dean Winchester’s first memory is the day his mother left Lawrence, when Mary took him aside and showed him how to use a shotgun. “You ask your daddy to take you hunting, make sure you practice this, alright?” she said more than once throughout the process. Dean, who was 4 years old, nodded seriously. There aren’t any pictures from that time – secrecy is a value the Winchesters have never quite learned to let go – but those who knew him described him as unbearably cute, with a smatter of freckles and an unusually sour resting expression, inherited from his mother. “Now, say it back to me. What’s the first rule?”

“Never point at someone you don’t intend to shoot, no matter what,” Dean said.

“Good. Second rule?”

“Safety is always on, except when you’re shooting.”

Mary rustled his hair. “That’s my boy. I’ll show you how to load it one more time, and then I’m headed out.”

She loaded and unloaded it twice more, and then had Dean repeat the process until she was satisfied he could do it without asking her instructions. “You practice this at least once a day until I come back,” she said. “Keep it in your room, in one of those empty drawers you got in your wardrobe. Don’t tell Dad, alright, baby?”

“Where are you going?” Dean said, instead of answering.

Mary pursed her lips. “Missouri,” she said. “From there, I don’t know.”

Dean looked down at the gun – unloaded, but still set carefully aside, because Dean listened to his mother’s instructions. He wanted to ask how long she would be gone for. “I’ll miss you,” he whispered instead, blinking tears from his eyes.

“Oh, baby.” Mary pulled him into a hug, fierce and warm, his pudgy hands curling around her neck. “God willing, I’ll be back before you even know I’m gone. This is just in case, alright?” She pulled back just far enough to press a kiss to his forehead, cradling him against her. “Practice what I told you. When I’m home I’ll check and see if you remember, and if you do, we’ll go get some ice cream. How’s that sound?”

Dean nodded into his mother’s shoulder.

“I’ll be back,” Mary said. “Take care of Sammy.”

And Mary Winchester went missing.

The next time anyone saw her was a month later, when John Winchester looked up from the note he was rereading at the sound of a creaking door.

John was the kind of man who looked like he might’ve starred in a war film from the ‘80s, but you weren’t quite certain enough to bring it up to him – broad, unshaven, kind of grumbly. He didn’t quite exude raw power the way Mary did, but he was certainly capable of holding his own. Normally, he would put it down to Dean getting a late night snack. He balled Mary’s note in his fist as he stood up.  
He checked the downstairs first – front door was closed, lock still in place. There weren’t the sound of any footsteps. On a quick check, Dean was sound asleep in his rocketship bed.

A figure stood over Sam’s crib.

John had the .45 cocked and pointed at their back in an instant. “Don’t move,” he said lowly. The figured – form nothing but a silhouette in an enormous overcoat and long hat – paused where its hand hovered over Sam’s form. Slowly it turned until features became visible – a cheekbone, a brow, an eye. At the profile of their face, John’s breath caught.

Mary Winchester put a bleeding finger to her lips and smiled.

No one knew where the fire came from – whether it was from Mary’s form, or if she had set something in the room, or if what she was doing to Sam triggered some sort of blast. But John was thrown backwards against the wall, a sick crack echoing down the hallway as his skull knocked the doorframe. He shouted as he collapsed, crawling up onto his hands and knees –

Mary’s form was gone, and the fire was spreading.

“Dean!” John shouted, hoarse. He fumbled forward, gathering Sammy in his arms, as the flame climbed through the room, up the curtains, over the ceiling, faster than any blaze should burn, impossibly so. Within moments, Dean was at the nursery door in his pajamas. John thrust Sam into his arms. “Take your brother outside as fast as you can and don't look back!” he barked. “Now, Dean, go!”

Dean nodded and scrambled out. John turned back to the nursery, pressing his hand over his eyes in an attempt to shield them from the flame. “Mary!” he shouted, voice hoarse. A piece of the wardrobe cracked off in the flame and fell in front of him. He took an uncertain step from the heat. _“Mary!”_

The flame licked after John as he finally scrambled back, trailing just inches behind him as he fled the house before, on its doorstep, it exploded, pushing him out once again towards his waiting son. John fumbled to his knees. Neighbors were starting to gather, and there was the sound of a firetruck coming in, but John did not see them. He was staring at the walkway, eyes distant, mouth hanging half-open as if struck.

Inside the house, wood crunched under Mary’s feet as she walked through the flame, untouched. She reached down – picked up the discarded note on the floor that she had left a month ago.

_2 NOV 1983,_ it read – that day’s date. _MICHAEL._

Mary Winchester smiled as she dropped the paper into the flames, watching it curdle to ash before she walked away.

* * *

Twenty-two full years later, on October 31, 2005, Sam Winchester was what one might call a walking cliché.

To start with, he looked exactly like he’d just walked out of a boy band due to ‘creative differences’ that mysteriously would not manifest in any change in his musical style. You could smell the hating his father on him. Sam Winchester looked like what the phrase “No, dad, it was your dream” sounds like. The only thing about Sam that didn’t fit the typical idea of a 2005 college boy was the fact that he was enormous – not just nearly taller than the average NBA player, but thick to boot. Thicc, even. (Sam told me to take that out, but if he doesn’t want me to say thicc, then he should give me a picture so I can make an accurate description, Samuel.)

None of this especially endeared him to his peers. Sam was an exceptionally intelligent man on top of being physically imposing, which had the unfortunate side effect of making people think he was kind of an arrogant dick. In truth, this just blocked them from finding out all the other perfectly legitimate reasons that Sam was kind of a dick. He was quiet because he was, embarrassingly enough, shy. Combined with the need to maintain a 4.0 at Stanford to keep his scholarship, even Sam’s friends considered him a quiet, studious sort of guy.

They would probably believe you if you told them he went downtown and shot ghosts when he needed to let off steam. They would just think he did it in a creepy way, not in a saving-people’s-lives way.

No, when it came down to it, Sam was a surface cliché. Some of that went beyond skin deep, like his family issues. But like all the people who are best at doing violence upon the world, occasionally that mask slipped away. He was getting better about it; like kicking any habit, the longer he spent away from it, the easier it was not to slip back in. But, as they say, when there was something strange in the neighborhood – who were they gonna call? Winchester.

Halloween was one night of the year that Sam absolutely forbade himself from making any sort of moves. Not only was it easy for actual monsters to use people as bait by virtue of good cosplay, Halloween is…weird when you know about monsters. Like if on Memorial Day, everybody picked an actual dead soldier to dress up as, and sometimes a veteran would come across a guy they shot. When it wasn’t panic-inducing, it was still creepy.

Sam’s friends did not fully understand this. “Sam,” Jessica said sternly. “You have not left this room in a week. I am not leaving until you agree to come drink an inadvisable amount of alcohol with me.”

Sam rubbed his eyes. The moment he had opened his door, Jessica had shimmied in and situated herself in the door to his room. She was now standing in full sexy nurse gear, hands on her hips, and glaring at him. Jessica was smart in a different way than Sam was – where Sam could pick up patterns and recite information, Jessica had the uncanny ability to simply guess things right on the first try, and, when she didn’t, the stubbornness to keep throwing paint on the wall until it stuck. “I don’t have a costume,” Sam said in lieu of an answer.

“Nobody will care,” Jessica insisted. She squinted at him. “Dude. You have to leave this room. We don’t even have to drink. At least come to the caf and, like, eat dinner.”

“I’ve been eating,” Sam argued from his position on the end of his bed.

Jess gives the pile of dishes on his desk a significant look. “You’ve been eating,” she repeated, slowly. “And what have you been eating?”

There was a moment of significant silence. “…Chinese food can last a long time if you’re careful about it,” Sam defended.

Jess threw up her arms. “Food! Right now! If you don’t want to pay for it or whatever that’s fine, we can use my ID, you gotta eat, man.”

Sam rubbed his face. “I have to do homework,” he said, but it was half-hearted; a part of him that sounded suspiciously like his big brother had already conceded the point. All it took was one more pointed look from Jess to have Sam on his feet, grumbling under his breath as he fumbled through his scattered laundry for something clean.

The unfair thing about Jessica was that she was gorgeous. This was something that Sam usually chose not to think about, on account of the fact that, for the most part, it was not something especially relevant to their friendship, because the other unfair thing about Jessica was that she knew all of Sam’s hang-ups. Not the specifics, of course – Sam was loathe to bring anyone in on the family business – but that Sam had been essentially raised in motels by his equally-stunted brother, and that his father for reasons beyond both of them couldn’t stand the idea of Sam attending college. In sum, that Sam had never learned social skills and had a damn good financial reason to avoid them.

Sam suspected, sometimes, that Jessica would be open to a more romantic avenue of their relationship. But it just seemed…unfair. Often when they went out he felt like an extremely awkward lamp post in the corner while she talked to people.

He at least appreciated that she took the effort to include him. He deeply valued their friendship – not just for how much easier it made it to choose someone for group projects in the many pre-law classes they shared, or for the way that she always seemed to know when he was having an ‘oh god what am I pretending at this for there are literal demons just hanging out right now’ freak-out, or how she had gently led him through the basic steps to being a human being that talked to other human beings. Jessica was just good. She went into law because she really believed in her ability to make change happen. If you wanted to get a little Freudian, she was like a Dean who went for logical deduction instead of shooting guns.

All of which is to say, in sum: Sam really did owe Jess one nice Halloween out. “Where’s the party you want to go to,” Sam said with something like defeat in his voice.

Jessica made a satisfied noise in the back of her throat, beaming at him. “Phi Psi is having a thing,” she said. Sam nodded to show he was listening as he tugged a second shirt on, carefully considering whether he wanted a third or not. “Honestly, we only need to drop in for like a minute. I really don’t want to be around our Greek life anyway, they’re such dicks, I just know that Brady’s gonna be there and I want my copy of The Martian back.”

“Nerd,” Sam said.

Jessica stuck her tongue out at him. “Put on your friggin’ clothes.”

It was on the way to the cafeteria that Sam first noticed something strange. He couldn’t put a finger on it at first – no one seemed to be watching them, and at a glance there were no signs of spirits. The tingling on his neck followed him, though – through dinner at the cafeteria, through the walk over to the Greek houses, and through the conversation on the sidewalk.

“You don’t have to come in if you don’t want,” Jess offered. Sam couldn’t hide his huff of relief. Jess patted him on the arm. “Wait for me out here?”

He offered her a weak smile. The moment she turned her back, Sam closed his eyes and focused.

Sam Winchester is built like a brick shithouse. He has an IQ somewhere in the 130s. He has an awkward charm, once you get past the layer of floundering. He is also psychic.

(Total. Fucking. Cliché.)

Sam felt a ping at the exact moment he heard footsteps.

He didn’t even bother to pull out of vision before he was swinging, in full view of anyone in the house. Whoever was on the other side yanked back just in time to avoid the blow, just managed to block the next one aimed at their stomach. An ankle locked around his – attempt to get him on the ground – he used the momentum to sweep, they jumped and dodged it – a complicated maneuver to pull him into an armbar, he ducked at the last second, twisted their thumb –

“Sammy, chill out!” shouted a familiar voice as Sam fell to the ground with a little shock, a forearm pressing to his throat with no real weight, and Sam said, “Dean?!”

“Jesus Christ, pull out of your freaky magic eyes, dude.” The first thing Sam saw as he tuned back in was his brother’s grin – cocky and self-satisfied as always. He had aged a few years since the last time they saw each other. His hair was messier, and he seemed to be wearing…make-up? That didn’t seem like the Dean Sam knew, but he couldn’t figure out what else could be going on with his eyes. It wasn’t strong. Very tasteful.

“You scared the crap out of me!” Sam snapped. Dean jumped up with an easy laugh, offering a hand that Sam took gratefully; without breaking movement, he pushed in to hug his brother, slapping him hard on the shoulder. “What the hell are you doing here?!”

“Well, I was thinking about going in and grabbing a beer,” Dean said cheerfully. “Maybe picking up some college students, yeah? _Rowr.”_

Sam pinched the bridge of his nose. “What the hell are you doing here?” he said again, with slightly more force.

Dean’s grin faded. He really did look good. At some point he must’ve inherited one of Dad’s old leather jackets, and he’d fully made it his own – patches lining the back with more than one rock band logo, one or two mementos he’d taken from some classier dives, what looked suspiciously to read ‘fuck the police’ in thick black letters. “Yeah, we gotta talk,” he admitted, glancing over at the frat house, where music was still loudly blaring. “Really didn’t think this was your kind of scene, though, Sammy. Figured you’d be holed up somewhere reading Hamlet.”

Sam scowled at how close to home the jab hit. “Couldn’t you have picked up a phone?”

“If I’da called, would you have picked up? Look – “ Dean set a hand on Sam’s shoulder as he started to say something, but a particularly loud bass beat cut him off. He glanced warily at the frat house out the corner of his eye. When he spoke again, it was slower, the measured discussion of someone speaking in code. “Dad hasn’t come home in a few days.”

Sam brushed Dean’s hand off. “So he's working overtime on a Miller Time shift. He'll stumble back in sooner or later.”

Dean ducked his head and heaved a long, exasperated sigh. “Dad’s on a hunting trip,” Dean clarified. “And he hasn’t come home in a few days.”

For a moment, they stood silently in the autumn chill. Over Dean’s shoulder, Sam could see Jess exiting the frat house with a skip in her step and a book in her hand. It felt like he was looking at it with his third eye – like it was miles away, or like he was seeing it through water, just a little distorted.

“Oh,” Sam said. And, when Jess’ steps slowed, shooting Sam a questioning look over Dean’s shoulder – “Hey, Jess. You know how you said I should get out more?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Can't promise any sort of posting schedule - just got a call in on a vamp nest in Chicago, and who knows how long that'll take. You would not believe how much harder it is to tell who's a vampire during quarantine. You'd think it'd be easy 'cause they have to get up on your neck, right? But one of the big vampire signs is not going out during the day. No one's going out during the day! There's a pandemic!! Monsters shouldn't be able to turn global pandemics to their advantage. It's unfair.
> 
> Anyway. Hopefully I'll be back within the week. And if not: stay safe, bitches.


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